05/10/2016

Cautiously Optimistic

Bioware likes making announcements about announcements, so while we
still know virtually nothing about Knights of the Eternal Throne that
hasn't come from data miners, we know that on Friday, everything will be revealed!

We
even got a teaser for a shiny new Blur trailer about a week ago, which really surprised
me. These are expensive and while I could understand EA splurging on one
for KotFE's effective re-launch of the game, I expected them to return
to business as usual for KotET. Apparently not.

(I can't believe that some people are actually complaining
about getting another trailer, arguing that they'd rather have a new
operation instead. Have you heard of this thing called a marketing
budget before? Good luck getting any company to completely forfeit
marketing in order to spend all that money on their product instead.
Considering that marketing is a thing that exists, I find them investing
it into a shiny new trailer more appealing than a bunch of "play for
free" ads on Google. But maybe that's just me.)

Anyway,
based on how bitter certain parts of the community have become over the
past couple of months, you'd think that Knights of the Fallen Empire
was the worst expansion ever, which is really weird because on the whole
it was really well done. My main two criticisms of it would be the lack
of support for group play in the new content and that levelling content
in general feels quite undertuned now. All in all though, I think that
there has been more a lot more good than bad.

I
really love level sync for one thing. Levelling alts since 4.0 has been
incredibly satisfying, as it's fantastic that you don't have to worry
about outlevelling content anymore and can receive XP and
level-appropriate rewards no matter where you go.

In terms of new quests to play through, the KotFE chapters have undeniably delivered much more in terms of quality and
quantity than any previous expansion. The other day I looked back at my gushing review of the first nine chapters and I can honestly say that I
stand by everything I said. That it loses some of the shine once you
repeat the whole thing half a dozen times or more over the course of
only a few months is hardly a surprise and doesn't invalidate the
original experience.

While no new group content
was added, I've loved the updates to flashpoints and operations. I was
originally a bit sceptical about all levelling flashpoints becoming
tacticals, but in practice I quickly found that they still provide a
similar amount of challenge to a levelling group as before and the role-
and level-neutral groups make group finder pops nearly instant.

The
revamped operations have also been really nice. I was initially a bit
worried about how I (and my guildies) would feel about re-learning
fights we had beaten before when we'd overlevelled them, but in practice
that hasn't really been a problem. And having such a wide variety of
content to choose from every week has been fantastic. For comparison,
the 3.0 cycle - while containing new ops - was immensely frustrating for
me and my guild due to the super awkward tuning of Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice and those two being the only places to go to for gear upgrades. The past year
has been so much better.

With that in mind, Knights of the Eternal
Throne delivering more of the same actually sounds like a good thing to
me, especially since Bioware has already stated repeatedly that they've
heard our feedback in regards to group content, lack of challenge and
overabundance of skytroopers. There've also been hints that we'll check
back on the Republic and Empire and find out more about what's been
going on with Valkorion, two things that have pretty much been my
biggest "wants" since KotFE's launch.

As the
title says, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not going to speculate about
the identity of the kid in the teaser trailer for now (I'll leave that to others), but we'll all find
out soon enough!

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